Dillingham Hyperdrive
The Dillingham Hyperdrive is orders of magnitude less complex than the Fringepath System. They don't even compare. to operate the Dillingham Hyperdrive, super capacitors, based on the Super Battery technology dump a metric butt-load of energy into the drive. the ship disappears here and appears over there. What direction and how far the ship moves is controlled by very fine alterations in how the energy is dumped into the drive. This is a finicky, delicate process. a good control computer and careful maintenance of the enrgy transfer system is essential. A Poorly maintained energy transfer system adds it's own english to the energy dump and that can can be very bad. The transit across unimaginable distances is instant. What takes the time is matching course and speed with the target system. This is a difficult process. Ideally, one transits to a point directly in front of the target star, far enough away to use Abbot Lift-and-Drive engines to match speed. Miss that sweet spot and you have to try again. Fortunately in this usage, Dillinghams are forgiving. Endless numbers of bored spacemen have commented on thee irony of crossing light years in an instant, and spending hours, days or weeks crossing the last few fractions of a percentage point of the distance. No good studies have been done to determine how many such spacemen are spaced for saying this. Crews are reluctant to self-report such activity. The practical limit of the range of the Dillingham drive is the accuracy of your range and direction bearings to the target. Getting these is harder than it sounds. Astronomers on Hastumi Earth have estimations of distance and direction/speed of travel relative to Sol to objects within 100 light years. Their error bars are far, far too large. Such information would be useless to a Terro-Human-Alliance Astrogator. Few Starships have the equipment, time or expertise to derive such bearing on their own. Bearings to stars in Sol's neighborhood have been painstakingly gathered over decades, by entire universities worth of people, support and equipment. One could try a blind jump. Good luck with that. Worse, one may not be clearly aware of how far and in what direction one has blind jumped. wth no clear references to it's own relative position, speed and direction, the ship now cannot tell how far and in what direction precisely to reverse jump. A good Astrogator can reverse his course and then refine his jump near a known object. Space is littered with the beacons of ships and unmanned vehicles that misjumped and are now lost. Signals requesting information can take years to arrive. Answers take just as long to return. A good asrogator is worth his weight in gold to a merchant starship. An Adequate one is a necessity. As humans expand to more worlds and set up radio telescopes, the frontier of safely navigsable space gets pushed back. More stars, systems and planets become well eenough mapped and charted to become legitmate destinations. As well mapped space expands in a linear fashion, the numbers of stars and planets to visit expands geometrically. A nightmare for control freak governments. Wait until they get a load of the Fringepath system! Category:Node +1 Category:Technology